Measuring Fundamental Care

“In healthcare, we measure what matters and what matters is measured. Too often, fundamental care is not a part of this equation. Failing to measure fundamental care only contributes to widely held, but incorrect, perceptions that this care has minimal value and impact on patient outcomes. Finding ways to measure fundamental care will create a culture shift where this care is rightly seen as foundational to all health and care services.”

– Feo

The work of the CFI Fundamental Care Research Team is underpinned by the Fundamentals of Care Framework, a co-designed, empirically-validated framework that demonstrates how high-quality fundamental care should be delivered and experienced. It consists of three core, inter-connected dimensions:

The development of trusting relationships between healthcare providers and users/recipients.
The integration of different fundamental care needs – physical, psychosocial, and relational.
A care context that is supportive of relationship development and the integration of care needs.

The Framework describes fundamental care as complex and multi-dimensional rather than simply a list of disaggregated tasks. To ensure the Framework can be usefully applied in education and clinical practice, we must also find ways of measuring fundamental care in this complex, multi-dimensional manner.

Goals

Our goal is to develop and test evidence-based, co-designed measures, assessment tools, and other products and resources, for the Fundamentals of Care Framework. In turn, this will enable us to:

Identify areas for improvement in care delivery, whether at individual, team, unit, or organisational levels,
Identify areas for improvement in educational initiatives, whether at the tertiary level or in continuing professional development.
Determine and compare the quality of fundamental care delivery across geographical and care contexts.
Understand the effectiveness of fundamental care interventions and quality improvement projects as well as teaching and educational initiatives.

Aims

Identify and evaluate the quality of existing measures that might map on to the Fundamentals of Care Framework.
Create new measures that appropriately assess the complex, multi-dimensional nature of the Fundamentals of Care Framework, within both education and clinical practice.
Develop measures that can be used for evaluation and self-assessment as well as for planning and designing interventions and other change initiatives.